Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase: Hilarious Stories of Air Travel by the World's Favorite Flight Attendant (13 page)

A pilot:

“We were just about to take off when a ramp worker called me and said, ‘One of the boxes we were about to load on the plane is ticking, and we don’t think we should put it on board. What do you want to do?’ I discussed this with the others in the cockpit and we talked it over with the gate agent and the dispatcher. The ramp worker told us the box was labeled with the owner’s name, so we decided to have him bring it up to us, and we would have the owner identify it and tell us why it was ticking. So we paged the passenger listed on the box and had her come forward and meet us in the jetway. The passenger was a classic Southern belle, a lovely young lady complete with white gloves and a genteel Southern drawl. She was wearing a crisp skirt and a white blouse and a matching hat, looking for all the world like a debutante at a garden party. When we asked her to open the box and show us why it was ticking, she turned ten shades of red. She opened the box, reached in, and turned off her vibrator. She very primly walked back to her seat, put on her seat belt, dropped her tray table, and put her head down on the table. I think she stayed like that for most of the flight.”

A pilot:

“On international flights when we go through security, we often see notices posted and hear announcements made concerning foreign countries that fail to meet American security standards. Once I was going through the security line with a fellow flight attendant when we noticed a poster that said, ‘Lima Peru does not meet our security standards.’ The flight attendant looked at that announcement, and then turned to me and said, ‘That’s awful! That’s so rude!’ and I asked her what she was talking about. She replied, ‘Just because some woman didn’t make it through security doesn’t give them the right to post her name all over the place!’ I quietly explained to her that Lima was a city in the country of Peru.”

A flight attendant:

“I am not a particularly limber person, but there was one time I accidentally did the splits. It just so happened I was on a 727 when Tommy Lasorda, the former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was in first class, seated directly across from the galley. I was working in the galley, wearing high heels and a short skirt, when I slipped on a piece of lettuce on the floor. I skidded half way across the galley floor, hollering all the way, and ended up doing the splits as I went down. Tommy Lasorda toasted me with his beer and said, ‘By God, you slide better than half my team!’”

A flight attendant:

“I was working a flight with an attendant who was in charge of keeping track of the cash we collected while selling drinks to the passengers. A lot of money changes hands and there’s always a big stack of bills to keep safe. Sometimes, on flights when meals are not being served, the oven will serve as a handy storage spot because you can fit quite a bit of stuff in there. So after we finished serving drinks, this flight attendant looked around for a safe spot to stash the cash and she stuck it in the oven. It would have been okay if only she had remembered to remove the cash bag from the oven after we landed, before the next leg of the flight, because the next flight did serve meals. We turned on the oven to pre-heat it….and all that cash went up in flames. It didn’t cause any damage or delay, but we all wept to see so much money go up in smoke.”

A pilot:

“I was flying for the Army when we took a plane full of paratroopers over a heavily wooded area of Georgia to practice night jumps. One of the paratroopers landed in a tree and his parachute got tangled in the branches so he could not get down. It was pitch dark and he had no idea how far off the ground he was. When stuck in such a situation, paratroopers are taught to take off their helmet and drop it to the ground while counting, ‘One—one thousand; two—one thousand; three—one thousand’ and if you can hear your helmet hit the ground by the time you reach four, it’s safe to pull out your reserve chute, let it dangle, and climb down it like a rope. But when he dropped his helmet and started counting, he never heard it hit the ground at all, so he figured he was stuck at the top of a very tall tree. The safest thing to do was to wait until morning when he could see what the situation was. Since it was a warm, calm night, he just hung there in his harness and eventually fell fast asleep. When the searchers came looking for him at dawn, they found him, still sound asleep, with his boots three feet off the ground, and his helmet suspended in the branches of a bush right next to him.”

A purser:

“We were on a flight to deliver the plane, and ourselves, to a destination, so there were no passengers on board, only crew members. Somebody decided we should do some ‘surfing’ on takeoff. To surf, you grab a serving tray, put it on the floor in the aisle at the front of the plane, stand on it, hold onto something solid for dear life, and wait for the moment the plane lifts off from the runway. At that point—when the plane is traveling 140 mph—you let go, and slide clear to the back of the plane on the carpeting. So I decided to give this a try. It would have worked marvelously, too, except that I forgot about the rubber floor in the galley. When the tray hit the rubber, the tray stopped—but I kept on going. That’s the last time I ever tried that.”

A passenger:

“An Australian flight attendant was flying stand-by. When you’re flying stand-by, you get a really cheap ticket, but you never know if you’re going to get on the plane or not. Generally, you only get a seat if a paying passenger fails to show up. If you’re seated on a plane when the paying passenger shows up, you get booted off the plane again. So this flight attendant named Mr. Gay was flying stand-by, and he was called to board the plane. After being seated, another passenger asked if he would switch seats, so he agreed. Then, the paying passenger showed up at the last minute. So the ticket agent boarded and went to the seat that was supposed to be occupied by Mr. Gay, and said to the man sitting there, ‘If you’re Gay, you’ll have to leave the plane.’ The real Mr. Gay overheard and stood up to say, ‘He’s not Gay. I’m Gay, and I’ll leave the plane.’ Then a passenger a few rows back got all huffy and indignant and stood up shouting, ‘I’m gay, too, and by God, you’re never going to kick
me
off the plane!’”

Random Factoids

•  Around 25% of first class passengers are paying full fare. The rest are upgrades, frequent flyer members, or airline employees.

•  Airlines update the fares in their computers about 250,000 times daily.

•  About 61 million Americans are members of a frequent flyer program.

•  About 47% of all frequent flyer miles are earned on the ground.

•  Approximately 75% of all frequent flyer miles are never redeemed.

•  Around 12 million free tickets are issued annually due to frequent flyer miles.

A pilot:

“A friend of mine was a flight attendant on a flight out of Salt Lake City. It was late at night and the plane wasn’t scheduled to board for another hour and a half. So she decided to take a nap on board the plane while she waited. The problem was that the ship cleaners were busy vacuuming and tidying up, and they kept disturbing her. So she opened one of the closets and took her blanket and pillow in there, shutting the door behind her and curling up on the floor. Well, she fell very deeply asleep and when it came time to board, nobody could find her. The crew finally decided they had to leave without her. She didn’t wake up until the plane was pushing back. She did the only thing she could do—she adjusted her clothes, smoothed her hair, and tried to step elegantly out of the closet as if it were the most normal and natural thing in the world to do. Not a single passenger said a word—but it took a long time for her fellow flight attendants to stop razzing her about it.”

A Tip From Betty

“Passengers sometimes get confused when they see flight attendants on board that are not lifting a finger or doing anything at all. This is because we are ‘dead-heading’ which is when we’re just flying home for our days off, or we’re flying to another airport to pick up another flight we’re scheduled for. Often times, we’re still in our uniforms, but we’re not on duty. This drives some people nuts. On one such flight, I was sitting in the middle seat with a passenger on either side of me, when a lady across the aisle kept giving me the evil-eye, glaring at me the entire time. Evidently, she thought I was the laziest flight attendant ever. Finally she stood up and, with her hands on her hips, said, ‘Would you at least get me a blanket?’ I explained to her I wasn’t on duty, and since she was standing up already and I was trapped by two passengers, it would be easier for her to get the blanket herself. So take it from me, if you see a flight attendant reading a magazine and sipping a drink or taking a snooze, they’re not being lazy—they are just dead-heading.”

Fact

Marma from heaven

Two cartons of Dickinson’s Fancy Sweet Marmalade fell through the windshield of Kitty Wolf’s car as she drove by Newark International Airport. It was later determined that a catering service had stacked the cartons of jam on the landing gear and then forgotten about them.

Fact

A hair-raising incident

A. Frank Steward, in his book
The Plane Truth: Shift Happens at 35,000 Feet
tells the story of a female flight attendant who wore a very large diamond ring. Because the ring was loose, the diamond constantly swung around to her palm. On one flight, she was serving breakfast when she casually reached over the head of a male passenger to grab something. The diamond ring became entangled in the man’s toupee and ripped it off his head. Startled, she thought that some sort of hairy rat-like creature was trying to crawl up her arm. Steward describes the scene: “She started to scream and wave her hand frantically, but the creature did not jump off. All of the passengers awoke and watched in fear and she screamed down the aisle, waving her hand ferociously. The other flight attendants were in shock as we watched the drama. She made it to the back of Economy and started to hit the wall in an attempt to kill or seriously injure the attacking creature. She eventually stepped on the hairpiece, pulled her hand free, and disappeared into the nearest lavatory. The cabin became silent, as all eyes were on the extremely embarrassed scalpee. He looked like a convertible caught in a rainstorm. Although many tried to hold back their laughter, few were able to. The man promptly reached into his carry-on bag and pulled out a baseball cap and waved to the crowd good-naturedly. The flight attendant emerged from the restroom thirty minutes later, gave an apologetic hug to her victim, and received a round of applause from the cabin. She spoke to him for a while attempting to explain, and surreptitiously handed him a sick bag containing the hairpiece. Before landing, Jean presented the man with a bottle of First Class champagne for being a good sport…She eventually got her ring resized, but never lived down her new nickname of ‘Little Running Hair.’”

A baggage handler:

“At the airport where I work, people buy their ticket and check in at one station, and then they bring their suitcases over to my station to check their bags. It’s customary for us to take the luggage from travelers, check their tickets, and say back to them, ‘That’s three bags to Chicago’ or ‘That’s one bag to Miami’ so that we’re sure we get the luggage tagged with the correct destination. One day two little old ladies came up to my station, on their way to Las Vegas. They each had one suitcase. I took their suitcases from them and said, ‘That’s two bags to Vegas.’ They got offended and said, ‘
What
?’ I began laughing as they sputtered and protested, ‘How
dare
you call us bags!’”

Random Factoids

•  About 480 bags move through O’Hare Airport’s computerized baggage handling system every minute.

•  Around 7,000 bags are lost or mishandled in the U.S. every day.

•  An average of 4.55 pieces of luggage are misdirected for every 1,000 passengers.

•  Approximately 97% of lost bags are returned to their owners within 24 hours.

•  About 435,000 bags are lost and never returned to their owners in the U.S. annually.

•  Around .005 percent of lost bags are permanently lost.

•  The Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama, sells about 10 million items from lost luggage annually.

•  About 500,000 animals are shipped by air each year in the U.S.

•  The San Francisco International Airport handles 60,000 bags daily.

•  NASA once shipped a camera from a space shuttle by air. It got lost and turned up in the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

•  When your bags are permanently lost, airlines are required by law to compensate you at the rate of $9.07 per pound of lost luggage, which works out to about $180 for a 20-pound bag. ($20 per kg)